In his recent article Deutscher (2009: 199) suggests that “nominalization is an unsung hero in the story of subordination”. He goes on to say that “[t]he ability to derive a noun from a verb, that is, to reify a verbal predicate and present it as a nominal argument or modifier, is the core of subordination”. While Deutscher (2009) believes that the relevant nominalization for his study is “deri...

The purpose of the Chinese PropBank (CPB) project is to add a layer of annotation to the hand-parsed sentences in the Chinese Treebank (CTB) (Xue et al., 2005). This layer of annotation assigns predicatespecific argument labels to the constituents in a parse tree. The arguments of each predicate in the sentence, which are limited to verbs and their nominalizations in the work we report here, re...

The German noun phrase generally reflects a straightforward four-way case distinction (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), but this is most clearly realized on the determiner. Nouns show a depleted case system: genitive is only marked specifically on masculine/neuter nouns in the singular. There are several contexts which require genitive case: possessor NPs and objects of certain verbs ...

Knowledge of derivational morphology potentially aids readers in the analysis and acquisition of new vocabulary, in lexical access and in establishing the syntactic structure of sentences. Although a number of studies have investigated the role of derivational morphology in acquiring vocabulary and in the organization of the internal lexicon, none have investigated the syntactic role of derivat...

This paper argues that Old Japanese (eighth century) had split alignment, with nominative-accusative alignment in main clauses and active alignment in nominalized clauses. The main arguments for active alignment in nominalized clause come from ga-marking of active subjects and the distribution oftwo verbal prefixes: /-for active predicates and safor inactive predicates (cf. Yanagida, In: Hasega...

In this paper I argue that the familiar lexical category labels, N, V, A, P or equivalently the features such as [±N, ±V] are redundant in a theory which admits a level of argument structure. I modify Zwart’s (1992) conception of a-structure by arguing that major class members always include a ‘referential role’: for nouns, (for ‘eventuality’) for verbs and (‘attribute’) for adjecti...

In this paper, we are concerned with the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of -er nominalizations in English. Our main contribution to the theoretical discussion on these nominals is that we should distinguish between two groups of -er nominals: those that obey the external argument generalization, irrespectively of whether they are eventive or not, and whether they have complements or no...

In the early years of the development of a theory of generative grammar (roughly 1955 through the early 1970s), a striking difference between the research problems that characterized the emerging field and those that had occupied its predecessors was the precipitous decline of the study of morphology. The principles of word structure can be divided roughly between those that govern the distribu...

LogAnswer is a logic-oriented question answering system jointly developed by the AI research group at the University of Koblenz-Landau and by the IICS at the University of Hagen. The system was designed to address two notorious problems of the logic-based approach: Achieving robustness and acceptable response times. The main innovation of LogAnswer is its use of logic for simultaneously extract...

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and incorrectly formed derived words were presented in sen...